I never fought once throughout grade school, reasonably well-protected and sheltered as I was.  In spite of this lack of experience, the possibility of me actually losing any sort of hand-to-hand combat never crossed my mind.  If it came down to it, sure I’d whoop somebody’s ass.  Why wouldn’t I?  I was the best at everything.  My mother had always told me so.

I’d been dogging this kid for weeks for no good reason, talking shit to him in the hallways, making faces, eliciting laughs from my newly-formed group of friends as we walked the halls as freshmen in high school convinced we were the coolest kids in our new class.  I never took him seriously because these kids I was running with at the time had all taken turns picking on him and smacking him around in grade school.  It was as though this particular person had been chosen for me to prove my toughness against because picking on him was something all of them had in common, a challenge each had gotten the better of.

On the day of the fight, I was operating under the assumption that we’d play some basketball or something and wait on things to develop.  When the time was right, I’d cheap shot, get the upper hand, and dominate from there.  But as I rounded the corner, I could tell this kid was ready to rumble.  The look  in residence on his face reflected hostility completely foreign to me.  

This wasn’t going to end well; I knew I was fu*ked.

A couple older kids and other dudes from our class were there, ready to watch these two nerdy white kids duke it out and see if this new guy to the crew, me, could fight.  To see if he was as tough as he boasted.  As it turned out, I could not, and I was not.

He ran down the hill and punched me in the face before I really processed what was going on.  He didn’t hit me hard, because this kid was tall, gangly, and not athletic.  That said, a punch to the face is a punch to the face.  After that initial shot, we wrestled around some, even once taking the brawl into the street before a passing car stopped and refused to move until we broke it up.  Instead, we moved the fight to an adjacent park and continued things from there.

There were no power-bombs, no karate kicks, no blows rained down while astride a prone opponent.  I bloodied his nose, he gave me a yellowish “black” eye and a bump on the head.  He put me into what was supposed to be a ferocious headlock, and I bit him – twice, the second time ripping at the flesh in my mouth – on the stomach to let me go.  Supposedly the assembled crowd, probably eight or ten dudes, were talking and shouting at us the entire time.  I heard nothing but grunting, smacking, and for some reason birds chirping and wind blowing, as though the people had all disappeared but somehow nature’s volume had increased while engaged in combat.  All in all, it lasted about fifteen minutes, and both of us walked away, me with everything but my pride and esteem in my new friends’ eyes in tact.  I made it home for dinner that night, and no one at the table noticed anything amiss.

Neither one of us could lay any claim to having kicked the other’s ass or could take any pride in having left a conspicuous mark on the other’s face, but it was this exact lack of any sort of domination that made the other kid the winner and me the recipient of a “beating” that I still get shit for, over ten years later.

Only one other time have I even pursued a fight, this next time when I was drunk and embarrassed by prior shenanigans and blew up at what remains a close friend.  He put me in my place with sufficient authority to leave a massive, gross-looking collection of scars on my back, and with that, my fighting career was over.

Two fights.  Zero wins.  Two losses.  The Bizarro Marciano.

I’ll never forget that first crack on the jaw.  The shelter surrounding my existence to that point was destroyed like one of the first two pigs’ houses in the old fairy tale, only this time not by the Big Bad Wolf but instead someone who looked and acted an awful lot like me.  The puffed up sense of self-worth I’d floated on to that point got blown away with one weak-armed fist to the face.

And in many ways I’m grateful for it.  It took some years to come to grips with the embarrassment, of course, but that kid did me a favor.  Nobody likes a snotty little dickhead who thinks he’s better than everybody else without having ever proven himself to be so.  With that punch to the face, my maturation process began. 

This life thing was going to be much more difficult than I’d ever imagined.